Verizon says that the service will be its first incorporate IBM’s backup infrastructure and management capabilities to help monitor and protect stored data.
Known as the Managed Data Vault, Verizon says the offering provides “security, quick and reliable daily backups and fast recovery of enterprise information.” Verizon and IBM say the service will be particularly useful for enterprises that have to securely store data in the 15 to 150 terabyte range.

“It’s targeted toward enterprises that need more security in their backup solution,” says Laura Elliott, a manager for IT solutions at Verizon Business.
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The downtime was caused by an overheating problem in our European data center where many of Wikipedia’s servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, Wikipedia was forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, but failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally.

The issue was resolved but the downtime was experienced an hour later beacuse of caching effects. The site was back online at around 3:00 PM EST.

According to Wikipedia’s twitter, “there may be some glitches as the data center in Amsterdam is still overheated”. The impact of Wikipedia’s downtime because of server overheat was surely felt by people around the world especially by students who uses the site for reference.

That’s the conclusion of a new report by data security expert Imperva. It found that a third of people choose passwords made up of six or fewer characters, while 60% opt for passwords from a limited set of alpha-numeric characters.

Nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords such as consecutive digits, or adjacent keyboard keys.

With around 50% of people also using the same (or very similar) password for all the websites they use, there are concerns that they are unwittingly leaving themselves at risk of online fraud.

The study also revealed the 10 most commonly used passwords.

Amichai Shulman, chief technical officer at Imperva, urges people to avoid using these common passwords, when using social networking, shopping and online banking sites.

“Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second – or 17 minutes to break into 1,000 accounts,” he adds.

Despite the rise in fraud and people using the internet, the problem of password secrity has changed very little over the past 20 years. Shulman says: “It’s time for everyone to take password security seriously; it’s an important first step in data security.”

How to ensure your password is secure

DON’T…

As well as avoiding the 10 most common passwords detailed above, you should also be careful about picking passwords that could be easily obtained by fraudsters – for example, your mother’s maiden name, your home address or the date of your birthday.

Never use a single word that you might find in the dictionary. Hackers often use an automated program – known as a ‘dictionary attack’ – to attempt the words of the dictionary. Short passwords (less than seven digits long) are particularly vulnerable to dictionary attacks.

Never use the same password for different accounts.

Don’t allow your computer to remember your passwords. Even if no one else uses your computer, if it is stolen the thieves will be able to access your private information and even hijack your identity.

DO…

Check how secure your passwords are by using Microsoft’s password checker tool.

Take advantage of the shift key; use the available characters – such as & or % – in addition to numbers and capital letters. Mixing different types of characters will make your password much more secure.

Try to ensure your password is a decent length, say 10 to 16 characters.

If you struggle to remember even simple passwords, then create a memory device to trigger a password. Phrases tend to be more secure than single words. Choose a sentence from your favourite song, poem or book, but mix it up by creating a password using the first (or even the last) letter from each word.

Use a different username and password for your online accounts – that way, if one is compromised you can be sure the others are still safe. At the very least, use different passwords for sensitive accounts such as your online banking.

Change your passwords on a regular basis – experts suggest every 30 days for the most diligent of internet users.
By Moneywise

Reliable: it is a vital point. You cannot afford to have downtime. With a downtime you will not only lose sales but credibility. Check what type of servers they have and their up time. If there are any testimonials look at them and determine that they are authentic.

Customer support: As you can never predict what type of technical problems you might have it is vital to have a professional and online support.

Monthly agreement (with zero fees for cancellation): Be sure to examine the agreement carefully and ensure that you only sign on a monthly basis not 6 months or a year. Make sure that there are no fees for cancellation.

Set up fee: Web host companies should not charge this.

Back up: Does your new host offer back up services?

FTP access: This is a useful feature that allows you to upload your website whenever you have any changes or additions to your website.

Email accounts: Make sure you have enough email addresses for your business.

Bandwidth (traffic) allowed: Normally 5GB is acceptable for most websites. Make sure you understand how much you are getting in your webhost package.

Extra services: Is it included in the monthly charge? Look into what you will have to pay if you need any more services in the future?

Price: Ensure you take into consideration, your site needs. Prices can fluctuate; cheap is not always a bad choice. It is sensible to look at this carefully.

With these few tips you will be able to choose your webhost company.

“The new offering is a hardware-based expansion of Big Blue’s Scale Out File Services and is based on IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS).

“The Samba-based systems include management nodes, switches, interface nodes, data storage nodes, RAID controllers and expansion units, and offer snapshot capabilities, tiered storage and HSM through Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

“It includes Gigabit Ethernet, 10Gigabit Ethernet and 20Gbps InfiniBand connections, and the storage system can combine up to 30 interface nodes and 30 240-drive storage pods to reach 7.2PB with 1TB drives and 14.4PB with 2TB drives, which will be coming in April, a month after general availability.”

The February update for Windows will close the loophole that dates from the time of the DOS operating system. First appearing in Windows NT 3.1, the vulnerability has been carried over into almost every version of Windows that has appeared since. The monthly security update will also tackle a further 25 holes in Windows, five of which are rated as “critical”.

Home hijack

The ancient bug was discovered by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy in January 2010 and involves a utility that allows newer versions of Windows to run very old programs.

Mr Ormandy has found a way to exploit this utility in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7.  The patch for this vulnerability will appear in the February security update. Five of the vulnerabilities being patched at the same time allow attackers to effectively hijack a Windows PC and run their own programs on it.

As well as fixing holes in many versions of Windows, the update also tackles bugs in Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2004 for Apple Macintosh machines.  The bumper update is not the largest that Microsoft has ever released. The security update for October 2009 tackled a total of 34 vulnerabilities. Eight of those updates were rated as critical – the highest level.

In January 2010, Microsoft released an “out of band” patch for a serious vulnerability in Internet Explorer that was being exploited online. The vulnerability was also thought to be the one used to attack Google in China.

Following the attack on Google, many other cyber criminals started seeking ways to exploit the loophole.

Also this week, a security researcher has reported the discovery of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer that allows attackers to view the files held on a victim’s machine.  Microsoft has issued a security bulletin about the problem and aims to tackle it at a future date. At the moment there is no evidence that this latest find is being actively exploited online.

Source: Tech at BBC

The article states that 20% of web users still use the browser that was first launched in 2001, includes government department, despite Windows incessant desire to update everything all the time.

Developers, it turns out, want the browser phased out so that they can develop stuff for newer browsing technologies. At the moment not many websites created for lower resolutions, nor people trying to create WAP versions of websites, so why should developers spend their time creating feature-rich websites for IE6!

Governments in other countries have recommended users switch browser completely, following a series of security flaws being discovered in the ever popular Microsoft product which, amongst other things, allowed the Chinese government to hack Google Mail accounts. It’s hardly a glowing recommendation for a product, especially when it took Microsoft so long to repair the flaw.

Should users stick with IE (in any of its last three incarnations)? Will Firefox continue its slow rise to the top? Is Chrome ever going to be a contender? Time will tell…

Since a computer system or a network consists of many parts in which all parts usually need to be present in order for the whole to be operational, much planning for high availability centers around backup and failover processing and data storage and access. For storage, a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is one approach. A more recent approach is the storage area network (SAN).

Some availability experts emphasize that, for any system to be highly available, the parts of a system should be well-designed and thoroughly tested before they are used. For example, a new application program that has not been thoroughly tested is likely to become a frequent point-of-breakdown in a production system.

They call the standard model “best practice.” When they’re in a different mood, they also call desktop lockdown a best practice, leaving you to figure out how it is that you tell your customers what they can and can’t do.

So we’ve had to run along the corridor, trying to make sense of it all. But you can’t make sense of nonsense.
I admit this conclusion is not a growing consensus. It isn’t even an emerging trend. It’s more a guerilla movement, promoted covertly by some renegade CIOs and supported by a few consultants and commentators who have rejected the conventional wisdom and industry punditry in favor of what their experience tells them works in real organizations.

Bassam Fawaz, CIO of a large global logistics company, is one of the renegades. According to Fawaz, “The IT conventional wisdom that is generously dispensed by many IT think-tanks and opinion makers is largely theoretical and offers little or no practical value.”

Businesses are starting to shake off the recession and think about the future instead of simply making it to next week. It’s the perfect time to board the right train — the one headed to the promised land, where IT is a strategic partner to the rest of the business, not a subservient order taker content to process work requests while accepting the blame for everything that goes wrong.

Want to board the right train? Your ticket to the promised land begins with this: No one inside your company is your customer.

Thinking that they are is the core fallacy of the standard model, and it has caused no end of trouble.

Take the common complaint voiced by (among others) Dirk Huggett, an IT business analyst for the North Dakota Information Technology Department: “You are always too expensive. One classic example is PCs,” he says. “Executives get flyers from different vendors for $299 laptops and get upset when the ones they buy cost them $800. It is tough to explain why the cheaper PC won’t run their mission-critical application. More information

Major deals involving Cisco included the purchase of LAN switching firm Arrowpoint Communications for $5.7 billion (£3.6 billion) in 2000, digital cable provider Scientific-Atlanta for $6.9 billion (£4.3 billion) three years later and web conferencing business WebEx for $3.2 billion (£2 billion) in 2007.

The VentureSource index was dominated by major IT organisations, with Google, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard among those also appearing, underlining the nature of an industry that demands constant development and innovation.

Despite heading up the leader board for the decade, Cisco saw a slowdown in deal activity last year, making just two acquisitions in 2009. Software giant Oracle was the most acquisitive company in 2009, having made five acquisitions during the year.

Both Cisco and Oracle have begun this decade in similar fashion to the last, with reports suggesting the former has acquired data centre and cloud security start-up Rohati Systems, while the latter this week announced a deal to acquire data quality firm Silver Creek Systems.